Similar, Yet Inexplicably Different
by Farewells
Summary: Defeated and broken, Barry Allen was drained of his Speed Force and left crippled on Earth-2. Completely alone, he was saved by a woman most peculiar; a villainous metahuman, with the face and voice of Caitlin Snow. She was similar in every way to the person he knew back on Earth-1, yet inexplicably different, for she wielded frigid ice, in both her heart and her fist. [FlashFrost]
1. Chapter 1

**A/n:** Okay, after watching the most recent chapter, I really couldn't resist writing a story between Barry of Earth-1 and Caitlin of Earth-2, especially because of how "broken" she feels to me. The whole part about her hating her name because it "reminded her of a weaker her", is so fun to play around with.

Follows the TV universe, except for Barry Allen of Earth-1 never meeting Caitlin Snow of Earth-2.

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 **Chapter: 1**

"What do you want?" he demanded, but the scarlet speedster was granted neither acknowledgement nor response.

Black electricity crackled across the darkened speedster's powerful frame, his impassive features hidden beneath a menacing mask. He stood silently across from Barry Allen, unresponsive and inscrutable; yet beyond his enigmatic presence, there was no mistaking the air of effluvium that emanated from the motionless being; it resembled malevolence, a venomous air of hostility.

Barry Allen could feel the tremors in his veins, surging through like enhanced adrenaline, a compelling disquietude he was unable to suppress; a warning, from the Speed-force itself.

He blinked, and the man was in front of him, his head tilted curiously, his presence overwhelmingly malicious.

Barry took a step back, a sharp exhale before pain enveloped his every sense. The figure lanced forward, the sharpened claws he had for fingers tearing into Barry's shoulder, digging through sinew and flesh. There was an eruption of blood from the entry wound, but before gravity could apply its laws to the falling liquid, there was a vivid flash of colors, and the two were no longer there.

The darkened speedster launched forward, effortlessly dragging Barry along by his impaled shoulder, skidding him across rough gravel and scorched friction. As they came to a sudden stop, the forward momentum launched the unwilling passenger into the air, smashing him into a vacant vehicle, the impact crushing the metal inward, caving him inside the twisted metal.

Something broke, and he couldn't move; his every extremity felt detached, useless. A gloved hand reached for him, pulling him out of the mangled wreckage. It lifted him into the air like a helpless rag doll, at the complete mercy of the darkened speedster.

"The Flash…" the being spoke, its voice dripping with animosity, "I have broken you…"

It reached for his mask, a single claw digging into fabric and flesh, tearing a straight line down Barry's face; he screamed, mask torn away as a line of blood drew down the scar's path.

"Weak…" the being hissed, his gripping tightening around Barry's neck, "you are nothing."

Darkness grew, Barry's vision fading as he clawed futilely at the hands that held him still. His legs swung helplessly, dangling off the ground, the pressure in his lungs increasing with each passing second. His body convulsed violently, desperate for air, the pressure expanding to a sharp pain, an agonizing wave that quickly engulfed him whole.

He gasped excruciatingly, and a sudden heaviness descended upon him; he was floating, and there was the oddest sensation, as though he was a passenger on a vessel's final trek. Barry Allen was vaguely aware of how tired he was; he had spent the last few years of his life fighting a myriad of different threats, perhaps it was finally his time to rest.

Yet before he could succumb to the temptations of wishful rest, there was a sudden throb as energy came spilling back into his every fiber, as sensations returned a million-fold and burned with the intensity of a dying star.

"Death would be a blessing…"

He fell, crumpled against the pavement, his body battered and broken.

The darkened speedster kneeled beside him, arm pressed against his spine, "The Flash… is no more."

There was a loud snap, as Barry's face twisted in agony, his jaw stretched in a soundless scream.

He was granted no reprieve, as Zoom picked up him in the next second and threw him forward.

He flew through the air, but the ground never came up to meet him, just wind. A torrential fury that wrapped around him like a cocoon, protecting him from the currents that tore and threatened his every existence. He saw an eruption of colors, and they were as blue as they were red, and green as they were yellow. The waves collided against the other, a growing symphony that guided his fall, an explosion at its crescendo that seemingly tore apart his every atom and re-merged them at the last possible second.

He was whole once more, and the floor greeted him with a painful crash, rough asphalt biting into his palms. The sounds of a passing monorail rumbled in the skies above , the reverberating tremors of the ground amplified the fiery pulses across his shoulder, a jarring screech that brought him back to reality. He quivered, eyes piercing through the darkened mist that shrouded his vision, and was greeted with a world same, yet inexplicable different from his.

Barry tried to move, but all he managed was a pathetic twitch before the surrounding darkness consumed him whole.

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He was floating for the longest time, in pools of black that held neither surface nor end; an empty expanse that stretched further than his consciousness could grasp.

When he eventually woke from his tired slumber, the first thing he noticed was the cold. An unnatural presence, an abnormality he couldn't exactly explain; it was cold, but unlike the frigidness of ice, it was instead an aberrant wave of frost.

He blinked a few times, his blurred vision slowly starting to focus; he was in a dreary room. Dirtied curtains hung pathetically beside a faded drawer that rested against stained walls. There was also a metal door that led to the outside, an old television that belonged to the previous century.

He was in an old motel room. He pulled back the blankets, revealing most of his heavily bandaged form. Everything hurt, a dull throb that started to build upon his awakening, but it wasn't horrible, it felt like someone had injected him with a series of anaesthetic while he slept. He tried to get off the bed, but he soon realized that other than the slight wiggling of his toes, his legs were otherwise unresponsive.

He pulled himself up into a sitting posture, his face pressed into his palm. He could remember the events that led up to his unconsciousness, his defeat by Zoom's hand and his arrival on Earth-2, but there remained no recollection of what followed next. Someone moved him into the motel room, and as far as he could see, tended to his wounds and cleaned his injuries.

He had no allies on Earth-2, not while Jay and Harrison remained on Earth-1. They had closed all the breaches except one, but the remaining breach can only be opened from Earth-2 by Zoom. There was nothing they could do to help him, he was entirely alone.

A soft click came from the entranceway, the sound of clinking keys as the doorknob started to turn. Barry tried to reach for something he could use as a weapon, but there was nothing within his grasp. He turned towards the bedside lamp, hoping to wield it as a blunt weapon of some sort, but it was beyond his reach, he was hindered by his useless legs. He stretched desperately, the bed creaked loudly and he was suddenly falling, crashing painfully onto the floor below.

Barry groaned as his arm pressed against the side of his rib, where it took the blunt of his fall. It felt wet, his wounds must have reopened from his fall. It was a peculiar sensation, his wounds usually healed a lot quicker.

"What the hell are you doing?"

It was a female's voice, a familiar tune. He turned towards her, his jaw gaping open in surprise.

"Caitlin?"

It was her, Caitlin Snow - Bio-engineer at S.T.A.R. labs and a member of team Flash, someone he could trust with his life.

Except it wasn't.

The Caitlin Snow he knew, she was back on Earth-1. This was someone else, a person with the same face and voice, someone so similar, yet inexplicably different.

He noticed her lips twitching at the sound of her name, "That is not my name."

The Caitlin he knew could be described with the word, 'tidy'. She was prim and proper, always well-dressed and formal. This Caitlin however, was almost the complete opposite. Instead of her usual neatness, her hair was grown out and wild, her clothing seemed hastily thrown on and her makeup felt particularly aggressive, powerful colors that the Caitlin he knew would never don.

She was also pale, a lot paler than her Earth-1 counterpart, her skin almost translucent, as though never graced by the sun's touch.

The door was quickly closed behind her.

"What are you doing on the floor?" She hissed, unamused at his predicament.

"I… I…" he spluttered, "I fell?"

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	2. Chapter 2

**A/n:** Took me long enough to update. Chapter 2, here we go!

Rest of my thoughts at the bottom of the chapter!

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 **Chapter: 2**

The sky outside was low and dark, a gloom representation of Barry Allen's current state. The monochromatic backdrop was quickly dismissed with the pull of curtains, an immediate dimming of the room's interior as it was drawn abruptly into the caress of natural darkness.

There was a soft click as a nearby lamp was switched on at its lowest setting, a soft luminescence that colored the room in a shade of orange.

Pulling himself back up onto the bed, Barry Allen watched as his newly arrived companion peeked out from behind the drawn curtains, a few long seconds spent studying the streets below, as though making sure there weren't any suspicious activity in the nearby vicinity.

When seemingly satisfied with whatever it was that had drawn her attention, she turned back to him. Their gaze met, and he came upon eyes of justified mistrust, a fathomless coldness; not an emotionless indifference, but a stark chillness that reminded him of the ceaseless frigidity of ice.

Words were left unsaid for the longest time, there remained only uneasy silence and the soft hum of the above air conditioning unit.

If this was not the Caitlin of his earth – and she certainly was not – then there remained no qualms as to who she was.

When they first planned their journey to Earth-2 in order to close the final breach, he had familiarized himself with all of Harrison Well's detailed Earth-2 metahuman reports. It was a precaution, he wanted to be prepared if they were to encounter any.

The feeling was surreal, to say the least. They had tried to avoid their counterparts during the first visit, unsure of the repercussions of meeting their opposite-earth-clones. But there she was, standing across the room from him.

Killer Frost, a metahuman from Earth-2, someone with the same face and voice as her human counterpart from Earth-1. A parallel similarity, yet he knew beyond a doubt, that the two Caitlins couldn't have been any more different from the other.

The Caitlin he knew from his world, was kind and loving, a warming presence in his tumultuous life. She was always there for him, as he was for her. They were colleagues, the best of friends. She had saved him more times than he could remember, and he trusted her with his life.

This Caitlin however, seemed cold and hollowed, her eyes a haunting grey, her presence an uncomfortable chill. He did not know much about who she was, but he read the reports, he saw the photos of those that she killed; shattered fragments of ice that were once human, pieced together into faces of captured horror.

The Caitlin from his earth, she wouldn't dare harm an insect, much less another person. The Caitlin from Earth-2, she took dozens of lives without as much battling an eyelid, she was dangerous, perhaps even more so than some of the toughest metahumans he had ever fought.

"W-what… are you doing here?" he asked. There was a reason why he was still alive; she wanted something, and he wasn't in the state to decline.

Her arms crossed the front of her chest, her eyes narrowing as he spoke, apparently displeased with his suspicious tone. "Is that how you talk to the person who saved your life?"

It certainly wasn't what Barry Allen was expecting, not at all.

"Wait what? I mean… I…" he felt flustered all of a sudden, completely unsure of what he should say. He remained apprehensive, but it was a most peculiar situation. "Thanks… I guess?"

He looked down at his bandaged form, some of the lesser wounds were already in the midst of healing, but the more severe portions still hurt with movement. "Why?"

Her head tilted curiously. "Why what?"

"Why did you save me?" he said softly.

"Should I have left you for dead?" she asked rhetorically. "Because you would be."

"No, that is not what I meant."

He looked away. It wasn't the answer he wanted, but he had no way of gauging her intentions in a non-insulting manner. He did not stereotype metahumans, but she was a villain and a murderer, there was no chance of her rescuing him out of the goodness of her heart. He wondered, w _hat did she want from him?_

"You must know that I am a breacher," he said.

Every Earth-2 metahuman he had encountered thus far knew of him. Zoom had painted a visible target on his back, and it was hunting season for them all.

"And you... you work for zoom." He paused. "So why did you save me?"

He noticed a slight twitch of her lower lip, a familiar response that he knew all too well – frustration – the same way Caitlin of Earth-1 would react whenever she came upon a hitch in her plan, or a fallacy in her field of study.

"You are pretty talkative for someone who was on the verge of death just a week ago," she said.

"A week?"

"Yes, a week." She exhaled disgruntledly. "Your bandages don't change themselves you know."

"That couldn't be," he looked down at his wounds, painfully grimacing when his fingers brushed across the side of his ribs. The pain felt different, a foreignness he couldn't explain, an unwanted sensation not felt since he gained his speed.

His legs, he had initially thought of them as a temporary impairment, but if Zoom had succeeded in taking his speed, and with him being unable to heal like he used to, Barry Allen was now nothing more than just… human, and it terrified him.

He tried to stand, only to feel his legs giving out completely beneath him. He crumbled painfully to the ground, grunting as the wooden surface greeted his bandaged form with a loud thud. "I…" his breathing was erratic, "I can't feel my legs."

"Calm down," she moved beside him, and he noticed her eyes falling into his reddening bandages. "Your wound must have reopened. You are in shock from the loss of blood."

He tried to calm himself down, to will his breathing into a slower pace. There were hundreds of possibilities and scenarios running through his head. There must be a reason for the sudden absence of his body's healing, but he couldn't help but to land upon the most probable, and also most dire – he had lost his speed.

"You're bleeding," she said as a matter-of-factly.

"Get up," her fingers dug into the bottom of his uninjured shoulder, "you are no use to me dead."

She swung his arm around her shoulder, using her body's momentum to hoist him upwards and helping him over to the bed.

She headed for her bags next, removing a fresh roll of bandages and towels.

Knowing better than to use the motel's dirty water, she uncapped a recently purchased bottle of mineral water and started to soak the towels.

Moving beside his resting form, she undid the older bandages' knot and started to peel the layers off. He did not resist her help, as a pile of reddened cloth soon ended up discarded by his feet.

"This might hurt a little," she said as she pressed the towel against the edge of his wound, prompting a sharpened inhale from his end. "The stitches must have came off when you fell. I need to apply another layer."

"Do you… know what you're doing?" He couldn't help but to ask. The Caitlin from his earth was as much a doctor as a scientist, she was impeccable with a scalpel. But this was a completely different Caitlin, and as similar as they were, he knew they had lived such vastly different lives.

"I was a nurse once." She said in a manner that demanded the end of conversation, as though it was from another life long passed; not forgotten, but wished so.

He did not pry further, but gritted his teeth together as he felt the needle piercing flesh. It wasn't long before he realized how wrong he was to doubt her, the process was quickly done within minutes. She stemmed the bleeding and stitched his wound.

"Thank you again," he said softly, "I'm-"

He flinched at the contact of her finger against his skin, a touch as chilling as ice. She was helping him apply some sort of ointment to his wound that would help alleviate the pain, but he knew that the coldness wasn't from the brown colored paste; it was her.

She remained impassive to his reaction, though it was clear what prompted his abrupt retreat.

The bandages were applied to him next, a fresh layer that she tied firmly around his ribs, a final tug to make sure it was fastened before heading into the bathroom to wash her hands of his blood.

When she eventually returned, he had already tried his best to clean up the surrounding mess, but it wasn't as easy without the use of his legs. He felt confined to the bed, and there was little else he could do or accomplish.

Barry Allen had never felt so helpless in his life, and it scared him, more so than he dared admit.

"Is it too tight?" she asked when noticing his pained stared, unaware of the conflict that raged in his mind.

"No, it isn't." He shook his head. "It's great, thank you Cait-"

"I told you, that is not my name," she snarled, and it was then when he first noticed the surge of anger that flushed heatedly beneath her cold façade, a visible blaze within her icy exterior. "It is Killer Frost."

"But you are Cait-, I mean, you are her, aren't you." He asked, not understanding her sudden hostility.

"I was," she replied dispassionately, as chilling as the seeping glance of winter, the previous wave of anger evaporating as though never existed. "But no longer."

"I don't understand."

"Caitlin Snow is dead, there is only Killer Frost."

It was bizarre, but Barry fell into quiet acquiescence. If that was what she wanted, he would respect her request, there was no reason to deny her wishes.

"What you said before," he asked slowly, "about me being no good to you dead, what did you mean?"

"I…" she was quiet for a long while, "I don't really know anymore."

"What do you mean, anymore?" he asked.

"You are the breacher aren't you? The person that Zoom had gathered all the metahumans for. Perhaps he was afraid of you once." She paused, before continuing coldly. "But look at you now. You're crippled, and useless."

She sighed, "I thought you could… it doesn't matter anymore."

There was a slow growing realization of her initial plans, and he was suddenly more so aware of why she had saved him. "You wanted me to stop… Zoom? Why?"

"No, not stop him." Their gaze caught, and he saw the flickering of embers that burnt beneath icy pools of grey. "I wanted you to kill him."

"I thought you worked for him?"

"None of us did," she said scornfully. "But when faced against a monster who could take your life in less than a blink of an eye, what else is there but compliance?"

He thought of all the metahumans that he had fought since the singularity that brought the two earths together; the dozens of them that Zoom had sent through his portals. "You could have fought him, together."

"Getting killers and thieves to work together?" she laughed contemptuously before speaking in a scathing manner, "you're even more foolish than I thought, Flash."

In a way, she was right, if he couldn't defeat Zoom when he had his powers, it was both foolish and delusional to think he still stood a chance in his current state. But still, he had to try, and if he had to sacrifice himself in order to stop the darkened speedster, then so be it.

Zoom made a mistake by not finishing him on his own. If he was thought to be dead, then he would use it to his advantage.

"I might be crippled," he said softly, but even she could hear the fiery resolve in his voice.

"But you are wrong if you think that I am useless." His fingers balled into the bedsheet, his eyes clouded with intensity. "I will stop Zoom, with or without my speed."

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 **A/n:** If you've guessed it, you're right! Barry won't be regaining his speed, or even the control of his legs for some time. I wanted a reluctant alliance between a crippled Barry and Killer Frost (:

Thank you all for the reviews, and do tell me if any mistakes are spotted. I don't use a beta.


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